Caring for You

South African sunset last August. Photo by Wade Jones.

This past Sunday afternoon I was invited by St. Julian's Episcopal Church in Douglasville, Georgia, to lead a session on “Care for the Caregiver” as part of a long series supporting lay people in ministry. I was a little overwhelmed by the detailed content I was given to present in an hour’s time. The night of the day I began preparing I of course had a dream of leading the event, and I feared running out of time, though in the dream I had a whole day to work with, not just one hour! But my sleeping brain (or should I credit Holy Spirit?) gave me an idea how to approach the challenge.

Part of the challenge was that the small group attending had either been part of a centering prayer group for years or were enrolled in an Episcopal Church multiple year program about faith and ministry fundamentals, or both! In my dream I said to them, “I am stepping into a river that has flowed a thousand years,” meaning their combined experience, and added, “I have more to learn from you than you from me.”

Yet we are all part of a two-thousand-year-old movement initiated by followers of Jesus who were so good—so kind, compassionate, and hospitable—that others wanted to be like them. And here I refer to Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief, in which she affirms that this evangelism by attraction is how the first “Christians” inspired converts.

I realized “care for the caregiver” is what this blog has always been about. I wanted to equip progressive Christians, who are not only care-givers but justice-seekers, with what I had been given to sustain my activism: a prayer life, contemplative ways of undergirding, strengthening, inspiring, and (perhaps most vitally) sustaining a ministry of compassion and care.

The course was trying to impart the wisdom of Saint Benedict, who saw spiritual community as the stabilizing foundation of a ladder to rise to great heights, to touch the face of God as well as that of other creatures through work, study, and prayer, with order, balance, and moderation.

So, still in my dream and then after as I woke in the dark to reflect on it, I began coming up with questions to solicit the wisdom and experience of the group. The members of their Community of Hope are the ones who will be there for years after my “splash in the pan” appearance—best to help them remember that and for me to recognize I am their beneficiary not their benefactor.

I’ve decided to share with you some of what I shared with them.

How do you care for yourselves? I asked. I explained not to judge any self-care methods, just be honest. As an example, I listed my own self-care practices: morning prayer and reading, of course, running and weightlifting, healthy diet and a good night’s sleep—all admirable, but also, watching old Frasier and Murder, She Wrote episodes and comfort food and chips and wine.

Do you have difficulty saying “no”? A denominational church leader came to me for regular spiritual guidance for a season and I advised her to tape “I can say ‘no’” to her office phone. A book entitled Ministry Burnout points out that often it seems to take as much emotional and spiritual energy to tell someone “No, I cannot do that” than it takes to just do it! But, as Jesus sensed healing energy going out from him when the woman with a hemorrhage touched him, anything we do may deplete our energy and effectiveness, so focus and boundaries are needed.

Do you trust your spiritual community? What I meant by that is do you believe in the variety of gifts you’ve identified in one another as you’ve come to know each other? I invited them to speak about those gifts, and I was moved by their readily offered affirmations.

I explained the “joke” in the first church I served after seminary was that, if you identify a need the church should address, you take the lead in that ministry! After all, you are the church! That’s how we started our jail ministry for gay inmates, our outreaches to homeless gay youths, our sack lunch program for the homeless.

Identifying our own gifts, strengths, and weaknesses and inviting others in our spiritual community to identify theirs, we better know when to refer to meet an expressed need or how to best assign and offer assistance. None of us have to be everything to everyone.

What is your motivation? The curriculum provided an exercise to help us sort “sympathy” from “empathy,” listing distinctions that, to me at least, were too clever and convenient, suggesting the first was controlling and the second detached. Somewhere in between is the word I would use: compassion, which means “suffering with,” and compassionate has been applied to both the Buddha and Jesus who respectively represent detached mindfulness and sacrificial love.

Compassion requires attentiveness and listening. Henri Nouwen gave the example of an incident from his early years in ministry when he gave beds to a family that had been sleeping several to a bed. Upon his next visit he discovered they had sold the extra beds and gave a party for all their friends. What they needed was a celebration, not more “things.”

When I worked with first-time AIDS volunteers and workers in the early years of the pandemic, I invited them to consider the values motivating them and identify their “spiritual community,” encouraging them to be creative in discerning the latter. One woman had the “aha” that her women’s tennis group was her spiritual community. Over the years they had been there for one another through births, divorces, deaths, jobs, unemployment, illness, and emotional ups and downs. I suggested that their values and their spiritual communities would help sustain them in this new work.

What are your boundaries and limits? Recently, working with someone with mental health and addiction issues, I am cognizant of how narrow the line between compassion and enabling can be. This is where a spiritual community and/or a spiritual director can come to the rescue. The curriculum on care advised ministering in pairs, consulting each other, and gaining input and support from the larger group.

Do you trust healing is possible? Healing and growth and fruitfulness seem to me built into the very nature of things. As Henri Nouwen once wrote, if you keep digging up a seed to see if it’s germinating, it never will grow. A physical therapist told me that wounds heal from the inside out. A massage therapist friend begins each session invisibly making the sign of the cross over the client’s body before applying his healing touch.

During the commissioning service of a trainer of hospice workers, she was to be given a charge by two clergy. The first minister went on and on and I have no recollection of what he said. The second minister cut to the chase. She said, the people whom hospice workers serve want to know two things: Am I alone? And am I loved? I believe that’s true of all who need care.

I recommended the best book on care I’ve read, How Can I Help? by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman. The authors’ presentation of first person narratives from care-givers and care-receivers from around the world suggest that the least patronizing and most satisfying care is experienced as mutually beneficial.

As an example of that, something I didn’t mention in my recent reflection on my mother-in-law’s passing was that, like other times we enjoyed talking, we continued to “talk” with each other in her final days when she rarely spoke at all. I brought reading material when visiting, but didn’t even look at it, I was so taken with simply watching her.  

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Thanksgiving and Addiction

This past Thanksgiving weekend was largely given up to work around a friend with mental health and addiction issues. As I considered writing about this, I found myself getting angry, given that every day of the weekend—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—was largely given over (by multiple people) to attending to this person, one way or the other.

The crescendo of my anger came as I thought of entitling this post, “You Probably Think This Post Is about You,” alluding to the song lyrics, “you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” And here I was again, in writing this blogpost, devoting time to the individual in question.

But I realize I am not writing this for that person, but for you, the reader who has, has had, or will have the experience. And for those who think a minister or a friend should not have anger about a loved one with mental health and addiction issues: I daresay you have not yet had the experience yourself. Anger is good for boundaries, for setting limits, for speaking truth to the power of demons overtaking another’s life and those who care.

Jesus himself rebuked crippling demons, disbelieving doubters, even his disciples when they got stupid in his presence.

The friend I write about is the same for whom we held out such optimism upon entering a recovery facility in March of 2016 in a post entitled, “Wounding God.” Despite everyone important to this individual participating in the recovery process at this person’s request, our friend eventually bolted when challenged by a counselor in a group setting. It happened the night I was attending a wedding rehearsal and dinner, and I was on the phone with our friend, who was still in the parking lot of the recovery facility. I urged a return to the group to no avail.

Since then have come many a reconciliation followed by reversals and “episodes,” some of which have been threatening, dangerous, or destructive. An otherwise privileged, well-educated, and gifted person “acting out.”

I believe our friend must exercise responsibility to take prescribed meds, attend therapy, and participate in recovery programs, but there is a factor I’ve observed that may weaken our friend’s resolve. When involved in a restrictive religious environment, everything could be held together tightly, including sexuality. But finally realizing that one can be gay and Christian, all the religious trappings that held everything closely bound together were loosened.

Our friend’s obsessive-compulsive disorder no doubt meshed with a church’s obsessive-Christian disorder, but sexuality, like spirituality, needs room to breathe.

Jesus’ friend Lazarus was neatly bound in funeral swaddling cloths. “Unbind him and let him go,” Jesus commanded. Resurrection requires loosening up, letting go.

The very term religion denotes being bound. But the only thing that should bind Christians is expressed in a song I alluded to in last week’s post:

Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love.

To my friends in Southern California, please attend Pat Hoffman’s latest book launch Friday, Nov 30, 5:30 pm, in the Pavilion at the Museum of Ventura County, 100 East Main Street, Ventura, CA 93001. The memoir recounts her ministry of accompaniment with people living with AIDS. My blurb for her book, entitled Summoned and Shaped:

“When the church equivocated in the early years of the AIDS crisis, Pat Hoffman boldly initiated a ministry with persons with AIDS, many of whom were wary of anything religious. This moving and poignant story of how her own life prepared her to gently join them on their journey may help all of us who serve the ‘spiritual but not religious.’”

https://www.amazon.com/Patricia-L.-Hoffman/e/B001KCJPZS

To support this blog:

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

What to Expect of a Pastor

This is as much about what NOT to expect from a spiritual guide or pastor as it is about what to expect.

We can expect pastors to be compassionate. Compassion manifests itself in a variety of ways. Maybe they take great care to get to know everyone—which, incidentally, most pastors say takes two to five years. Maybe they administer well and fairly. Maybe they spend a lot of time on lesson plans, meeting agendas, worship liturgies, or constructing a sermon.

Maybe a pastor emphasizes the “passion” of compassion, and can set a fire under your pew to help those in need and to work for peace, justice, and equality. Maybe a pastor manifests the “suffering with” that compassion literally means in pastoral care and counseling and spiritual direction.

The pastor may be gentle, someone you want to talk to, or the pastor may be charismatic, someone you want to listen to. The pastor may be introverted, more of a contemplative, someone who needs more time alone.  Or the pastor may be extroverted, wanting constantly to be among you. Compassion comes in many forms, and the majority of pastors would not be in their profession if deep down they were not compassionate.

Pastors may not have time to memorize a sermon, given other pressing responsibilities. They may not be natural speakers. We are spoiled by politicians and megachurch preachers who have the benefits of teleprompters speaking to us as if they are not reading what they are saying. Or we’re impressed by speakers who have the advantage of saying the same thing over and over again to different audiences. And some of us have been spoiled by senior pastors of large churches whose only job all week is to write and practice their sermons, while associate pastors do the day-to-day “hands on” ministry.

We can’t expect pastors to be like the pastor of our church in which we grew up; in some cases, we may hope they aren’t! We can’t expect a pastor to be a parental figure for us: he is not our father, she is not our mother. Though we can expect a pastor to be friendly and a kind of friend to all, and we might be blessed with a pastor as a personal friend, we cannot expect this. True friendship is a gracious gift, not something we can write into a job description.

The pastoral relationship is a professional relationship. You might be friends with your doctor or therapist or lawyer, but you would not expect this when engaging them to do their work. Indeed, close friendship might even interfere with the professional distance required to be effective, being of real help. Think of the things you withhold from a spouse or a friend. Think of the ways we avoid challenging a spouse or friend.

We can’t expect the pastor to be psychic, always knowing when we need to talk. As our own best ministers, each of us must take responsibility to ask to talk with the pastor when her or his ear is needed. Some I have served have gone through tough times only to tell me later they didn’t want to bother me because I was so busy. Now this may be Southern for “mind your own business,” but sometimes I felt I was attending to lesser issues rather than vital issues.

A church member once laughed when she confessed that she was an adult before she realized that pastors got paid. Some of us have the feeling that pastors should do what they do for the mere love of it. This is where the distinction between ministers and pastors is helpful. All of us as Christian ministers are called to do what we do for the mere love of it, not for the reward of heaven or human praise, but because we can derive satisfaction by doing what is right, just, and charitable. Part of our own ministry must be to support pastors adequately so they may devote their time to shepherding our congregation.

We can expect a pastor to need our support. The best support a pastor could have is regular attendance at worship and any classes and special programs she or he devises.

Offer a pastor one-on-one positive and critical feedback, in person and in private, just as the biblical injunction suggests, rather than presenting it to anyone else through gossip or in meetings. Rage or blaming or innuendo works about the same with a pastor as it does with a spouse or a friend.

Have regard for her or his personal life, not expecting pastors to attend every event, not using their partner or child or friends as a means of communication or manipulation. All of this is a two-way street: you can expect a pastor to behave like a professional, offering one-on-one feedback in private when allowed, avoiding rage or blame or innuendo, addressing but not creating conflict through e-mail, not using partners or children or friends as a means of communication or manipulation.

Trust pastors to be professionals. If you can’t get them on the phone, or if you find them running a personal errand, trust that they have arranged their schedule in such a way to fulfill their professional responsibilities. Pastors I know work well over a 40-hour week, and even when not formally at work, they are constantly thinking about what could be done to improve the life of the congregation. That’s what pastors do.

Expect all church leaders to be professional, even as volunteers. Sometimes we excuse unprofessional behavior with the caveat, “Why, they’re only volunteers.” Expect church leadership to observe and preserve professional boundaries. Expect them not to be abusive verbally, emotionally, sexually, or spiritually. Expect them to live a life with as much integrity as possible. Expect them to confront anything that might interfere with their professionalism, even as volunteers, such as addictions, control issues, or problematic partner or child. Expect them to follow professional protocols, procedures, and decorum.

But then expect the same thing of yourself. Do not be seductive and abusive with your leaders. Have as much integrity as possible. Confront your addictions, control issues, or problematic partner or child. Behave professionally in your process and behavior.

And above all, don’t expect the pastor or any church leader to be any more perfect than you are! In the spiritual life, I believe, the goal is integrity, not perfection. Mistakes are made by all of us, thus forgiveness is foundational for a spiritual community. Perfection suggests that we may finally “arrive”—a source of false pride—while integrity is a lifelong spiritual progress of integrating our beliefs, words, actions, feelings, and wisdom. Think of it as juggling; you may drop a ball, but you pick it up and start juggling again. None of us are perfect jugglers, but we are steadfast jugglers or we give up all together.

Last week’s blogpost served as prelude to today’s post. Check it out if you missed it:

God Is Our Shepherd.

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.